Mini-Round-Up

Greetings Bookworms! Below are a few highlights from the last half of March.

New Release

The Gunners: A Novel by Rebecca Kauffman

Blurb Courtesy of Goodreads:

Mikey Callahan, a thirty-year-old who is suffering from the clouded vision of macular degeneration. He struggles to establish human connections—even his emotional life is a blur.

As the novel begins, he is reconnecting with “The Gunners,” his group of childhood friends, after one of their members has committed suicide. Sally had distanced herself from all of them before ending her life, and she died harboring secrets about the group and its individuals. Mikey especially needs to confront dark secrets about his own past and his father. How much of this darkness accounts for the emotional stupor Mikey is suffering from as he reaches his maturity? And can The Gunners, prompted by Sally’s death, find their way to a new day? The core of this adventure, made by Mikey, Alice, Lynn, Jimmy, and Sam, becomes a search for the core of truth, friendship, and forgiveness.

A quietly startling, beautiful book, The Gunners engages us with vividly unforgettable characters, and advances Rebecca Kauffman’s place as one of the most important young writers of her generation

Additional Buzz:

NPR: “Unusually for a literary novelist, Kauffman has no fear of overt feeling. When she explores an emotion, she does it with absolute candor. Her characters announce their grief and affection and rage in a way that few others do…And the brilliance of The Gunners is that it helps you. Kauffman teaches you the right way to read her prose. To put it in Loofbourow’s terms, she shows you how intentional she’s being, how canny a writer she is…Another thing literary novelists don’t often let themselves do is write novels with morals, or messages, but The Gunners has one. It’s clear, though not easy: Accept your emotions. Feel them bluntly, plainly. Allow yourself to flinch. There isn’t a better way forward. Not in life, and not, I suspect, on the page.

Many of Ms. Shreve’s novels were set in New England and touched on subjects as diverse as airplane crashes, textile mills and World War II. Her books seldom had happy endings, but all of them shared an irresistible page-turning quality, with a strong emotional undercurrent, often colored by death and romance.

Critics were not always kind — “the presiding spirit is Fabio, not Henry James,” one reviewer sniffed in the New York Times — but readers adored Ms. Shreve’s books.

“Her secret,” Washington Post journalist Zofia Smardz wrote in 2002, “is that she simply has the Gift — the ability to hook you from the first page, draw you in and pull you along, though you may kick and scream, and not let go until the final word.”